1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology that allows shooting a high quality still and/or moving picture. In particular, it is an object of the present invention to provide a computer image processing apparatus for images shot with a camera, which allows generating a clear image free from blur by hand movement in shooting the image and allows shooting a moving picture tracking a target subject by preventing the jitter of an image due to a hand movement by capturing the subject properly.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a large amount of moving picture data is reduced by calculating motion vectors between moving picture frames and generating moving picture data with the motion vectors and a reference image.
On the other hand, a technology has been disclosed for correcting a blur in an image due to a hand movement in shooting it by calculating motion vectors between multiple still images shot by an imaging apparatus such as a camera (refer to Patent Document 1, for example).
The reliability of a motion vector must be increased in order to reproduce the moving picture more accurately and/or correcting the blur due to a hand movement in shooting. As a technology for increasing the reliability of a motion vector, Patent Documents 4 to 6 disclose technologies where processing by handling highly correlated motion vectors as those with high reliability is performed.
Furthermore, a technology for maintaining the accuracy of motion vectors and, at the same time, reducing the data amount to calculate more may include identifying feature points of images and calculating motion vectors about the feature points or forming a polygon by connecting the feature points, recognizing how the polygon is deformed by the movement of the feature points among the images to be compared and estimating the positions where the other points are moved (refer to Patent Documents 2 and 3, for example).
Another technology has been disclosed that uses an affine parameter as motion data in order to increase the freedom of the detection of movement such as a rotation of an image and to efficiently perform a correction process with high accuracy (refer to Patent Document 7, for example)
Patent Document 1: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2003-78807
Patent Document 2: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 11-506576
Patent Document 3: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 10-341445
Patent Document 4: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 9-73540
Patent Document 5: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-311502
Patent Document 6: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-153146
Patent Document 7: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 9-98424
By the way, when the function for generating motion data such as a motion vector, an affine parameter or the like is implemented by not special hardware but a computer having a calculation function, how a load on the computer is to be reduced during calculating motion data with high accuracy is a problem.